


It Could Be Nice

by rustedcrimson



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff, Fluff and Angst, One-Shot, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 01:12:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6174241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustedcrimson/pseuds/rustedcrimson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aziraphale sighed. “I know what you mean. But the truth of the matter is, the world isn’t going to be here forever, and someday, we’ll both have to go home.”<br/>“Someday we’ll have to fight each other,” Crowley said quietly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Could Be Nice

It was a rather rainy day in late March, the kind where the sky dims to a pallid gray, and rolling gusts of thunder vibrate across plains and cities, evoking a very distinct feeling of poetic gloom. Which, if one looks at the literature of the time, (1825) was apparently a sort of constant state in England for a good century.  
Crowley was taking a carriage to meet Aziraphale for lunch, and was watching the rain slither down the windows, absentmindedly hissing to himself. He’d had a terrible day. He’d come up with what he’d thought was an absolutely brilliant plan. He’d trip people on the sidewalk with an invisible cushion. But it had all gone to hell when an old woman had had the audacity to fall from her balcony and completely ruin the whole plan by landing right on it and quite rudely, being completely uninjured. And the worst of it was, he was happy about it.  
And it kept happening! Just the previous week he’d accidentally managed to save a child from freezing to death in a late night rain by lighting an abandoned house on fire. The boy had walked right over to the house and warmed himself up and gone on living. And besides that, the family that lived in the house beside it was quite ecstatic that it was gone, because it’d been blocking their view of the river.  
He thought that he must be an awful demon to enjoy helping people far more than hurting them. It made him very angry. He was going to tell Aziraphale all about it, very angrily. Maybe he would light something else on fire. He had always liked lighting things on fire. That at least was a proper demon thing to like, he supposed. He wasn’t entirely sure, he’d been on earth an awful long time, and humans seemed to enjoy lighting things on fire too. Either way, he thought that it was not a good thing to do, and that was all that mattered. 

 

The carriage stopped, and Crowley slid out. He could see Aziraphale through the window of the restaurant. He had already ordered a cup of tea, and was reading a book, which had only a few more pages left. Crowley stood in the rain and waited. He didn’t want to interrupt. He huddled under the tiny canopy and lit a cigarette. He was getting very wet.  
He could have done something about it, but he felt that there were too many people about. People seemed to get rather scared when he did that sort of thing, and he didn’t like scaring people.  
Aziraphale finally turned the last page and closed the book.  
“Crowley, you’re sopping wet!” he exclaimed as the demon slid into the booth across from him, shoulder-length black hair sending droplets slipping down his back.  
“It’s fine.”  
“How long have you been outside?”  
Crowley ignored the question. He took a sip of the coffee Aziraphale had ordered him, which had gotten disappointingly cold. “I saved another person Aziraphale,” he said irritably. “I just don’t understand it!”  
“I think it’s because really, that’s what you want to be doing,” Aziraphale said dryly, stirring another cube of sugar into his tea.  
“Yeah, well- you got someone a broken arm last week ‘cause you dropped a book on their head at your shop, did you want to do that?”  
Aziraphale blushed. “I fixed it up right away!” he said quickly.  
“Yeah, but you still did it.”

 

“What did you do this time?” he asked, diverting the subject and staring guiltily at the tablecloth, which he had always felt, quite strongly, did not match the rest of the restaurant's decor.*  
“Saved an old lady who fell off a balcony.”  
“That’s good.”  
“Exactly!” Crowley whined. “It’s embarrassing! What kind of demon goes around saving people? It’s absurd.”  
Aziraphale stirred his tea. “Do you remember that time you dried up a river so nobody could go swimming that summer? And it prevented a flood that would have killed hundreds of people? I got a commendation for that, you know.”  
“Yeah. And I remember that time you funded an orphanage that happened to be right on a fault line and collapsed a month after it was built, killing dozens of orphans. I got a commendation for that.”  
“It’s absurd.”  
“I know!”  
“I think we’ve been on earth too long,” Aziraphale sighed.  
“Well I’m sure not going anywhere else.” Crowley grumbled. “Better than anywhere else I’ve been, that’s for sure.”**

*They went there often, and at least once a month, Aziraphale would bring this up to Crowley, who would agree and pretend as though he hadn’t had the same conversation at least twenty times before. And every time, Aziraphale would go on about how he planned to bring it up to the owner, but he never did, because it had become his custom to bring up the tablecloth whenever he didn’t know what else to talk about, and he didn’t want to lose his emergency topic.  
** And Crowley had been to Heaven, Hell, and Earth, and most certainly did favor Earth above the others. Hell, he’d decided, was far too cramped, Heaven was far too idyllically rustic, and Earth was just right. Though cities, he’d realized, reminded him more and more of Hell. It was like a little bit of home away from home. 

 

“I wan’t suggesting we ought to go anywhere else,” Aziraphale said, exasperated. “I was just saying, that perhaps a bit of humanity is rubbing off on us.”  
“Well maybe if you’d stop hanging around with all those writers-“  
“If you’d stop hanging around with all those musicians-“  
There was a pause, and they both said, quietly and at the same time, “If we stopped hanging around with each other.”*  
“But we can’t do that, it would be terribly lonely,” Crowley said.  
“Exactly.”  
“They can’t put us on Earth together and not expect us to spend time with one another.”  
“Precisely!”  
“And besides, I think we have more in common with one another than with-“  
“Exactly what I’ve been thinking.”  
“And really, it’s the intentions that matter, isn’t it?”  
“Yes! And with humans practically doing our jobs for us-“  
“They do, don’t they?”  
“I think we’re doing fine,” Aziraphale said.  
“I think so to. I mean, nobody’s come to tell us otherwise.”  
“And if we were really going against His plan enough that it mattered, wouldn’t he have had a word with us?”**

*If Crowley and Aziraphale could respectively be considered representatives of Hell and Heaven (a stretch after all their years on Earth, and even before that) than it was no surprise that with a little bit of Heaven and a little bit of Hell came a distinctly human sort of attitude.  
**Neither of them had ever actually heard God have a word with anyone, but they both also figured that if either of them were really fucking something up, he’d probably say something, even if it was just a vague and unintelligible murmur, or a sort of audible color, maybe a visible emotion. Something like that.

 

“Probably.”  
“I think,” Aziraphale began, “That as long as there’s a mixture of good and bad on the world, it’s all going according to plan. Really, in that case, there’s hardly even a need for us to be here.”  
“I’m glad we are though,” Crowley said decidedly.  
“So am I.”  
“What’re we gonna do when it ends?”  
“Go back to where we- belong, I suppose.”  
Crowley sat quietly for a moment. “I really think we belong here, now.”  
“But we don’t.”  
“According to who?”  
“According to Him.”  
Crowley scoffed. “Yeah? Well if I’m not fit for Heaven, and I don’t fit in in Hell, then where exactly do I belong?”  
Aziraphale sighed. “I know what you mean. But the truth of the matter is, the world isn’t going to be here forever, and someday, we’ll both have to go home.”  
“Someday we’ll have to fight each other,”* Crowley said quietly.  
Aziraphale pulled out his pocket watch. “Wow, it’s getting late,** I should be heading home, need to close up the shop.”   
“Oh, don’t be like that, we could just change the subject.”

*It was a thought that had crossed both their minds multiple times, but they preferred not to think about it, or talk about it, because it really put a damper on the mood. Aziraphale would usually suddenly need to go do something else when it was brought up.  
**It was 3pm.

 

“Yes,” Aziraphale began huffily, “But it’s going to be in the back of our minds all day now, and-“  
“Well then maybe we ought to talk about it for once!”  
“What is there to talk about!”  
“I mean- I don’t want to fight you, you don’t want to fight me, why can’t we just- not fight?”  
“That’s not how it works, Crowley.”  
“It could be! They can’t make us fight.”  
“I feel like they probably could.”  
“I mean, they haven’t made us do anything so far, just told us what we ought to do. And it’s not like we’ve really been listening.”  
“You’re saying, when it comes down to it, you just, won’t fight me?”  
Crowley nodded.  
“Then I won’t fight you either.”  
Crowley smiled, and absentmindedly flicked his tongue out. “What’re they gonna do about it? Stop the apocalypse to have a word with us?”  
Aziraphale swallowed a laugh, imagining both sides temporarily abandoning the ancient prophesied chaos to pull the both of them aside and tell them they simply had to fight one another and that the End Of Times would just have to wait until they could unsettle their differences and despise each other as all proper demons and angels did.  
“And after the world ends?”  
“Well- someone has to win, right? If my side wins, I’ll protect you-“  
“And if my side wins, I’ll protect you,” Aziraphale said. 

 

“And it won’t quite be the same, because we won’t have-“  
“People.”  
“But we’ll have each other, and I think we’re getting pretty close to being people,” Crowley said.  
“We could open a little coffee shop somewhere-“  
“And stash some music sheets and instruments away-“  
“And we could make it almost like Earth.”  
“Yeah,” Crowley said softly.  
“It could be nice.”  
“It could.”


End file.
